The NZ government, which has already depopulated its capital city by firing loads of civil servants a couple of years ago, is turning to AI to replace shedloads more.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis wants AI baked into government work as it prepares to axe about 9,000 public service jobs and
announced the cuts in a speech that took aim at the country’s “bloated public service.”
Willis said New Zealand’s government has 39 departments and ministries, compared with 16 in Australia and 24 in the UK. She described the public service as “scared of AI, slow to move to the cloud” and stuck with a “complex and fragmented set of overlapping IT solutions.”
“Our government is as frustrated as you are by the fragmentation and silos, the complexity, the status-quo thinking and the dangerously slow take up of digital and AI technologies,” Willis said.
Aotearoa’s answer is to tell its Chief Digital Officer to make AI deployment “a basic expectation for all public entities.”
Willis pointed to “a recent trial of an AI scribe tool in hospital emergency rooms which has reduced the amount of time clinicians have to spend on file notes and increased the time they spend with patients.”
She said the planned overhaul would “reduce the number of government departments, increase the use of AI and other digital tools, and deliver significant savings.”
The government plans to cap departmental budgets and use redundancies to save NZ$2.4 billion, about €1.2 billion, across four years.
Plenty of tech companies have justified redundancies by claiming they need the right workforce for the AI age, even though such savings have not materialised.
Few governments have tried the same trick at this scale, but the NZ Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, when elected, said he wanted to run the country like a business (he was a CEO for Air New Zealand). He gutted the civil service when first elected and is now battling a decline in popularity. He was forced to call a confidence vote last month amid an economic slump and rising debt that led to outlook downgrades by two ratings agencies in March and April.
New Zealand has extraordinary natural beauty and plenty of resources, but it has a modest tax base and residents who expect decent services. Willis is making a very large bet that AI can square that circle without turning public services into a chatbot queue.
The fact that she is trying to do it before an election in which her party is expected to suffer losses is very brave.
